Book Expo America, the big New York show for publishers, featured several new resources for self-published writers. Here’s a roundup:

• BookWorks founder Betty Sargent and BookDesigner founder Joel Friedlander have teamed up to publish The Self Publisher’s Ultimate Resource Guide. The new book contains over 800 curated resources, including editors, designers, and book marketing experts by name. BookWorks also offers an online database of vetted publishing professionals, as do Bibliocrunchand Reedsy.

• Publishers Weekly now offers “first reads” and “evaluations” of your manuscript by professionals in the book business. Through its Booklife site for self-published authors, PW experts will provide feedback on a treatment plus the opening 1,500 words of your manuscript for $79; or the entire manuscript for under $600.

• TextCafe is one of several new companies making it easier to create samples of your book to tweet, post or email to potential readers. You control the percentage of your ebook you want to reveal and which online bookstores to show your readers. Your sample goes out with front cover intact. TextCafe is offering a free 21-day trial. Litlette is offering similar sampling services through Facebook.

• BookBub, the company that offers new titles to readers at discounted prices, provided a glimpse at their own reader demographics during the Expo. Turns out they are strongest at reaching older women “empty-nesters”who are heavy readers of genre fiction (romance, mystery, thrillers, fantasy). Fifty-nine percent of their readers read over 4 books per month. You must be accepted into the BookBub program and you must pay for the promotion, but once accepted, you have a better chance of reaching the readers you want.

• SelfPubBookCoversfeatured at BookExpo a sampling of their large collection of inexpensive pre-made book covers. Such covers (which start at $69) are becoming a bigger part of the picture for authors on a budget, especially those writing genre fiction. Once a cover is sold, it is never sold again.

• Vellum offers a variety of templates to make your book interior look as though it has been professionally designed. As costs start at $29 per template, that makes Vellum’s templates less expensive than TheBookDesigner’s.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in self-published print books (like those created on CreateSpace) is in the choice of typefaces. They’re either too common or too weird.

Since most wordsmiths are design-challenged, I asked one of the best art directors in New York–Ina Saltz, author of the excellent Typography Essentials–for her short-list of favorites for the books she designs. Here are her recommendations:

And the worst choices? According to Ina, “Comic Sans and Papyrus are probably the two most reviled fonts on the planet. I could go into great length about why but they should just not be used, period.”

If you want to see the array of typefaces available in the market today, check out MyFonts. It’s a nicely designed site where you can easily purchase fonts you don’t already have on your computer.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re working on an ebook, it doesn’t matter which font you choose because the reader has control of the fonts and font sizes in your book. So pick something vanilla and use it throughout: Times New Roman is fine–12 point for body copy and 14 point for chapter openers.

Just back from BookExpo in New York, where I saw some extraordinary book covers. Over at Pinterest, I’ve put together a little board with comments on why each deserves special attention. If you believe, as I do, that people do indeed judge a book by its cover, check out my Pinterest Board.

Recently I asked several self-publishing companies to send me samples of books they’d produced. I told them I wanted to check the production values of those books–paper quality, binding, cover stock and so forth–before deciding whether to go with their services

This request is clearly not something they’re used to. One company, after expressing minor outrage, sent me a title with a note pointedly asking for its return. Okay.

But the real lesson was how many of these books were poorly designed. And a poorly designed book screams “amateur.”

Here are five faux pas of interior book design–all of which were clearly evident in the collection of books I received. Avoid them!

Typography Essentials by Ina Saltz

â€¢ Choose a “really cool” font. Make it italic, even. You’d be surprised how many ways there are to screw up fonts. If you’re not a pro, stick with simple fonts for both body copy and headers. Helvetica. Times New Roman, Gill Sans. These are your friends.

â€¢ Skimp on page margins. What is it? Are authors trying to save money? A real tip-off of a book published by an amateur is the size of its page margins. If you need to save money that much, reduce the size of your font, or tighten your leading, or choose a more condensed font–but don’t run those lines out to the edge of each page.

â€¢ Start a chapter on a left-hand page. If the previous chapter ends on a right-hand page, make sure the following left-hand page is a blank. Do not be afraid of white space!

â€¢ Run headers throughout. A header doesn’t belong on a page with a chapter opening. Nor on a page that’s otherwise blank. And it may not be appropriate on a table of contents, acknowledgment page, or about the author page. Pay attention.

â€¢ Keep your table of contents simple. Ah, here’s where you don’t want to be simple. Just listing your chapter titles with a page number is often not the best way to go. Your Table of Contents is your book’s roadmap. If you have subheadings in your chapters, you’ll want to list them here (but a page number for each subheading is unnecessary).

Because book design is so crucial to the acceptability of the book in the marketplace, it’s worth spending time to it. You may even want to forgo those mediocre templates offered by self-publishing companies and hire a professional designer.